Many times, users are communicating via email and instant messaging (IM) concurrently. However, present electronic messaging (such as email) systems have become unwieldy when threads of email messages are exchanged between a large number of recipients. An “email thread” is a string of related emails—generally generated through replies or forwards of the emails. These threads of mail messages become difficult to follow and keep track of in a business environment. This leads to confusion and loss of productivity, resulting from email overload.
This limitation is partly due to the asynchronous nature inherent to email systems. Email systems are not a natural fit in this situation. For example, this could lead to one participant's response being out of sequence with other people's responses. This is especially pronounced when the frequency of responses and/or the number of participants responding to the original email increases dramatically over a short period of time.
There is a need for a solution for transforming a thread of mail messages, as described above, into a real-time e-meeting, or IM conversation, with all of the participants.
Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based upon typed text. The text is conveyed via computers connected over a network such as the Internet. Email is, of course, another form of electronic communication but in a more asynchronous manner in that email messages are generally delivered with a time delay in contrast to IM messages which are delivered relatively instantaneously.
Because people use both types of communication, sometimes at the same time, it would be useful for the two types of electronic communication to collaborate. It would further be useful for an email thread to be aggregated or otherwise collected and displayed on the displays of the recipients in the email thread. Further, it would be useful if the user's inbox was synchronous so that the user could choose a user interface button to invite all participants to review the thread in real time so that any participants who accept would see a synchronized inbox that is limited to the thread in question, but the remaining semantics of the Inbox are left intact (i.e., visualization, commands such as “Reply” and “Forward”, etc). There would be no need to transmit the data within the email since all participants already have it stored locally in their inbox.
Some systems provide ways to trace back from an IM message to an email thread. The chat transcript is then stored back to the email thread. However, they are limited to a one to one mapping only and don't provide any aggregation techniques for abstracting an email thread into one entity and providing it to the thread recipients while keeping the email messages and chat messages distinct.
In view of the foregoing, a need exists to overcome these problems by providing a system and method for a system and method for transforming a thread of email messages into a real-time e-meeting.